Death Is My Comrade

With a body in his office and a pocketful of secrets, Drum heads to Moscow Eugenie is seventeen, with long legs, blond hair, and an appetite for misery. Daughter of a corrupt millionaire, she has bounced around Europe's finest boarding schools, and Chester Drum knows she's trouble the moment he sees her tearing her blouse to implicate Ilya Alluliev, a Russian diplomat, in rape. The man came to give her a message, an envelope that quickly finds its way to Drum's safe. Inside is an unsigned note claiming that a Russian Nobel Prize - winning poet is in grave danger. As soon as he reads it, Drum joins the poet on the Kremlin's hit list. The next day, Drum goes to his office and finds Alluliev on the floor, shot dead. The police cannot help him; Drum will find answers only behind the Iron Curtain. At the height of the Cold War, Drum will risk his life for the sake of a fire-eyed teen with a heart made of ice. Review quote: "Tight ... wild ... an eventful and effective thriller." - The New York Times Book Review "A cult author for lovers of noir fiction." - Mónica Calvo-Pascual, author of Chaos and Madness "A great pulpster ... always one of my favorites." - Ed Gorman, author of The Poker Club "Langton's sparkling prose and inimitable wit offer a delectable feast for the discriminating reader." - Publishers Weekly "Like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Langton is blessed with the comic spirit- a rare gift of genius to be cherished." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Biographical note: Stephen Marlowe (1928-2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955). Although a private detective akin to Raymond Chandler's characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage-tinged stories won Marlowe acclaim, and he produced more than one a year before ending the series in 1968. After spending the 1970s writing suspense novels like The Summit (1970) and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), Marlowe turned to scholarly historical fiction. He lived much of his life abroad, in Switzerland, Spain, and France, and died in Virginia in 2008.